As a reformer, I’ve been at my best when allowed to fix what’s broken

By David McElroy · January 20, 2019

I was hired to fix the Bolivar Commercial. I was a brash 24-year-old managing editor brought in to shake up a very bad small daily newspaper in Cleveland, Miss. I made some enemies in the building, but I fixed that newspaper, at least for the time.

Nobody in the newspaper was happy to have an outsider come in and change what they had been doing for years. The head of the composing department hated me, because he had been accustomed to telling editors that the things they wanted couldn’t be done.

I called his bluff and used his own equipment to show his people how to do what I wanted. He seethed with anger, because he didn’t want things to change. But he knew he had lost when I shot a film positive and stripped it into a page negative and double-burned a plate to produce the reversed caption I wanted on my first day there. He hated me — and he was angry the entire time I was there — but he didn’t lie again about what couldn’t be done.

I knew I had won when I received a letter a few months after I got there. Tony Tharp was a journalist who worked for the Clarion-Ledger — the state’s largest newspaper — but he had an interest in our area since it was his hometown. He competed against us for stories, but he wrote to tell me how much he appreciated me turning his hometown paper 180 degrees from something “near the armpit of Mississippi journalism.”

It took me a long time to notice this pattern in my life, but once I finally saw it, everything was obvious. I’m not sure how to describe this part of who I am. Agent of change? Builder? Radical? Fixer? No word or phrase really captures it completely, but the word that comes closest is reformer.

I’ve been spending a lot of time lately trying to figure out some things about myself — things which I seem to need to learn so I can keep heading in the direction I want to go. I spent weeks brooding and reading psychology. Then something clicked and I saw some patterns. As those patterns got more and more clear, I needed to talk about it — but it still feels incomplete, so this is very preliminary.

If you want to use my skills and get me excited about a job to be done, give me something that needs to be fixed. Give me a company or department or organization that’s broken down or messed up. Give me the authority to do what needs to be done — and I’ll fix what’s broken. I might break some egos along the way. I might hurt some feelings of people who want to do things “how we’ve always done it.”

But I’m at my best when I’m allowed to reform — to fix — what’s broken.

All of my life, I’ve had an instinctive feel for what was broken in the world around me. When I was younger, I was naive enough to believe I could fix everything I saw wrong. It took me a long time to realize that other people wouldn’t necessarily see things as I did.

Some people dreamed of being politicians because they longed for power and money. I grew up wanting to be president simply because I figured that’s what I needed to become in order to change all the things I saw wrong. It wasn’t the ego satisfaction I wanted. Instead, I wanted to remake the world in the ideal way that seemed possible to me.

When I look back at my history, I see this pattern over and over. When I took things over — church programs, newsrooms, whatever — I didn’t just operate them efficiently as they had been operated in the past. I walked in asking myself how I could change everything. I had no respect for the status quo. In my mind, I always started with a blank sheet of paper.

Even years after it happened, I can get excited explaining how I changed my high school newspaper. We added color. We printed bigger editions. We shook a lot of things up. And we started selling more copies than ever. After a few months, we even sold out of an entire edition, something which had never been done. I was only 17, but I was bursting with pride in what we were doing.

In my last newspaper job, I was editor and publisher for a company that didn’t really care that much about editorial content. Management at the company cared only about profits. I kept profits high, but I also radically improved the product. At the state press association convention, we won the award for most improved newspaper in the state. It was one of the four biggest awards given. When nobody in my company seemed to care, I knew it was time to leave.

I’m not sure I have a good point here — at least not one that will be interesting to other people. It’s just that I’ve realized something about myself that I should have already known.

If I have a big goal — fixing a broken company, starting something from scratch, doing something nobody thinks is possible — I get up every morning dying to do my job. I’m excited about life and I can’t wait to do something bigger and better and more profitable.

But if all I’m doing is the rote operations of something which any reasonably competent person could do, there’s no excitement for me. I feel like a cog in a corporate machine.

I haven’t been excited about the things I’m doing for a long time. Ever since I burned out in politics, I started doing things which weren’t especially interesting to me. I haven’t had a challenge and I haven’t been given the ability to start something or fix something for a long time.

That’s something I have to change right now.

I need a new challenge. I need to build a subdivision or buy a failing apartment complex and convert it to something good. I have to start something or fix something. I need a reason to care about my work again.

I should have already known this, but I just hadn’t allowed myself to consciously see it. I have strong visions of how things ought to be. I usually see directions about how to fix things before other people do. I can usually engineer a success or a turnaround if I have the resources.

I’m a fixer. I’m a reformer.

At my best, I bring change. I see what ought to be — and I make that happen.

I’m still working on understanding what to do with this new thought. Some of it involves going back to ways I used to think, but I haven’t figured all that out yet. Still, I’m excited about it.

I see how I want the world to be. I can’t change the entire world, but I can change certain parts right around me. It’s time to make some more reforms, starting with myself.

There’s a lot more to tell you — and this is very broad and general right now — but some very good things are going to come out of this if I can figure out how to implement what I see clearly in my mind.

I’ll just say I’m excited. Now I have to find partners who want to reform the world with me.

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When I first heard about this, I thought it must be satire. When I discovered it was real, I was appalled, but I still thought it must be a one-time thing from some nutty activist. But it turns out it’s the latest bit of pandering to a bunch of far-left activists who believe that a man can become a woman if he decides to claim he’s a woman. As everybody knows, men have prostate glands. Women do not. Period. End of story. Men can get prostate cancer. Women cannot. But political activists are so eager to pretend that a man claiming to be a “trans woman” is really a woman that they are insisting that “women” be included in public health messages about the issue. This is nothing but political virtue-signaling. If you’re a man, you know which parts you have. You know that you ought to be screened. Nobody is made any safer by dragging far-left gender ideology into simple medical reality.

Every time someone tries to tighten requirements around the use of absentee ballots, I hear screams from Democrats and others on the political left that such efforts are nothing but “suppression of black voters.” These protests have never made sense to me, especially because it’s never been a secret that absentee ballot fraud goes on all the time in certain areas. (Everybody knew it when I worked in politics.) The people who engage in such fraud are rarely caught — often because the local political establishment approves of the crime — but a Democrat who won a primary election in Clay County, Alabama, last year has pleaded guilty to this sort of cheating. Terry Andrew Heflin was running for a place on the Clay County Commission. He was caught ordering seven absentee ballots in the names of various voters and sending them to his post office box — after which he used the ballots to vote absentee for himself seven time. Did he have other people cast additional fraudulent ballots? We’ll never know. But in a primary in which he was able to win with only 141 votes, it wouldn’t take many fraudulent votes to change the election. The next time you hear “civil rights activists” claim that it’s just “voter suppression” to hurt blacks which is at the root of efforts to stop this fraud, remember Terry Heflin. If you care about fair and honest elections, ballot security and voter identity should matter to you.

A state legislator in Maine has been stripped of the ability to speak in the state Legislature — and her votes are not being counted on legislative issues — all because she made a truthful social media post. Rep. Laurel Libby (R-Auburn, Maine) opposes allowing boys to compete against girls’ teams in school athletics and she’s become known for making an issue of it. On Feb. 17, she posted on Facebook about a recent example that she found outrageous. She posted side-by-side photos of a boy named John who competed last year in a state track event and won fifth place against other boys two years ago — and a photo of the same boy (now called Katie) who won first place in the same event this year against girls. Whether you find this outrageous or not, Libby is clearly being honest and truthful about the objective facts of an issue of public importance. But the state Legislature censured her. Democrats decreed that she could not speak in the House and that her votes would not count on legislation — until she apologized for the outrage of telling the truth. She refused and her constituents have been unrepresented in the state House since then. The people who promote this ideology are out of touch with reality and won’t rest until they force the rest of us to join them in this delusion. But even if you agree with “trans” ideology, you should be appalled at this heavy-handed attack on political speech.

The late Steve Jobs was at the center of our culture’s transition from analog to digital. He co-founded Apple Computer. He led the team that revolutionized personal computing with the first Macintosh. As CEO of Apple, he led the development of the iPhone and later the iPad. You would think the children of such a man would be surrounded by technology. But Jobs and his wife Laureen didn’t let their children use iPads. Their home had few screens of any kind. Even though Jobs spent most of his time developing and selling Macs and iPhones and iPads, he was home with his wife and children for dinner when he was in town. The family ate together at a simple wooden table in their kitchen — and there were no digital devices or focus on popular culture. Instead, he’s said to have guided his family toward deep discussions of art, philosophy and education — with no iPads to be found. If the man who guided the development of such products chose a different path for his own children, does that suggest that his digital experience taught him that children need human connection, not screens? And does it suggest the possibility that we might be better off if we made the same choice for our families?

For four years, Donald Trump’s supporters screamed that everything that went wrong was the fault of Joe Biden. They were sometimes right and they were sometimes delusional. (Anybody who knows me understands that I can’t stand Biden any more than I can stand Trump, just for different reasons.) But for two months, Trump has rampaged through U.S. political life — vandalizing pretty much everything in sight — and the vast majority of his supporters are silent at best. Many watch as he blows up the world economy and they make excuses for him. They’re in absolute denial, even about things that Trump is doing very intentionally. Anybody who understands economics and history knows that tariffs are a terrible idea from a pragmatic point of view. Anybody who values individual freedom knows that tariffs are massive taxes on individuals — and they’re a tool of political control over the ability of people to trade freely. Trump is the antithesis of everything which political conservatives stood for just a few years ago. It’s far past time for people who claim to be conservatives to reclaim the principles and values which they used to claim — and stop this mad man before he can accelerate the day when we experience economic and social collapse. Open your eyes to reality and reject this lying narcissist.

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